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cameraleather.com to the rescue

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

I like to re-cover my old film cameras in new leather. Usually, brightly coloured leather.

Up until now, everything's gone swimmingly. I've re-covered a rangefinder in red lizard skin, a Minolta XD in snake skin, a Minolta X-700 in grippy rubber "Griptac", and another X-700 in bright blue "leatherette". Some samples.

red snakeskin on an Olympus 35DC

Minolta X-700 plus Griptac leather

But when I covered another XD body in similar Griptac, I found that the mid-grey look just didn't suit the thing. As shown below.

camera re-covering fail

So I ordered a new cover of "leatherette" at the same time as the blue kit for my X-700. The blue kit worked out very nicely, as here:

blue faux leather on an Minolta X-700

But for some reason, the black kit I ordered for the XD body started to peel at once. In the seven years that I've been dealing with kits from cameraleather.com, I've never had any such problem. So I wrote to them and asked if I'd screwed something up.

They responded by offering me a replacement leather for free!

Telling Mari about this, she responded by having a close look at the peeling black leather and said, "Black and black is boring. Get a colourful one."

Um, yes ma'am. One thing I can't bear to be is boring.